Tag: Mendeley Blog

The internet’s first great achievement was putting in place ubiquitous connections: people to people, people to information, and information to companies and institutions. Having spanned the globe and linked billions of people together, now comes an altogether more crucial phase: making the information gleaned from this vast, ever-expanding network relevant, personal and effective.

Mendeley Careers is at the forefront of this trend. Soon it will feature its first recommender function that makes looking for the next job suggestions more convenient than ever. Its unique algorithms will leverage the Elsevier ecosystem to provide tailored recommendations. It will no longer be necessary to knock on opportunity’s door, opportunities will arrive in your inbox, matched to your profile and interests. Continue reading “Coming Soon: Careers’ Suggest”→

At Mendeley Data, the open research data repository, we’ve just launched folders to help every dataset author group and logically organise their research data files into folders, in the same way they would organise files on their computer. Continue reading “Mendeley Data: Introducing Folders”→

What helps researchers to do their jobs? How can you best organize your documents, generate citations and bibliographies in a whole range of journal styles with just a few clicks? We offer you the chance to get to know Mendeley in Austria – at TU Vienna (Nov 21st) and TU Graz (Nov 22nd). You will hear about the enablement of reference management, support of international collaborations and researcher data insights.

On June 22, it was announced that Mendeley Data’s open research data repository won the Data Seal of Approval certification; this award confirms that the repository complies with the Data Seal of Approval guidelines, and is a trusted digital repository.

The 16 rigorous guidelines include guarantees to the “integrity and authenticity of the data” and “protection of the facility and its data, products, services, and users”. Also, these guidelines ensure that data can be easily cited.

When choosing a repository to deposit and share your data, it’s important to know that your data will be stored safely, and will be available, findable and accessible over the long-term. Choosing a certified repository is a way to ensure this. For this reason JISC, the UK’s publicly-funded research advice body, recommends selecting a certified repository to store your data.

The Data Seal of Approval certification highlights the value of the services provided by Mendeley Data, and Elsevier’s wider commitment to helping researchers make maximum use of their data, as well as store their vital data safely.

About Mendeley Data

Mendeley Data is a secure cloud-based repository where researchers can store data, ensuring it is easy to share, access and cite, wherever they are. Research data is published with a Force11 compliant citation; it is backed up by DANS (Data Archiving Networking Services) to ensure that it is safely archived.

Mendeley Data is pleased to announce that we’ve adopted the new Google Science Datasets markup standard for datasets.

For the non-computer science buffs amongst us, this means we describe our datasets in a structured way recognised by Google – which helps Google to index our datasets, and makes them more readily available in their search results.

This also means Google could eventually show datasets in a special way within search results, perhaps by presenting a “rich snippet” for a dataset like the example for a research article below. This makes them more visible and easier to scan by readers.

An example of a “rich snippet” search result, in this case for a research article

This applies to all datasets posted so far, as well as any new datasets.

This is all part of our efforts to make the data you share as discoverable as possible by researchers, so that it can be valuable to the community and you can get credit for generating and sharing it.

Any questions, thoughts or suggestions, we would love to hear from you.

Mendeley Funding is a new tool to help researchers find the opportunities to launch their projects.

Researchers are under more pressure than ever before to secure the money they need to do their work. The funding exists: the predicted worldwide spend on research in 2016 was $1.9 trillion. This was an increase of 3.4% on the previous year.

But with so many grants available in such a myriad of subjects via such a large variety of institutions, how can a researcher match their aspirations to the right opportunity?

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Mendeley Funding.

Mendeley Funding is a new tool which catalogues funding opportunities from across the globe. It includes calls for proposals from prominent organisations including the European Union, government departments in the United States like the National Institutes of Health, UK Research councils, and many more.

By using Mendeley Funding, Researchers can:

Search for relevant funding

Save interesting opportunities

Access detailed information about funders

For more information, visit http://www.mendeley.com/funding. Then sign in to Mendeley, access the tool by using the link marked “Funding” in the toolbar, and get searching. A world of opportunities awaits you.

Join Publishing Campus for this highly anticipated webinar in which three industry experts explore the issue of unconscious bias and its role in academic publishing.

About the webinar

Unconscious gender bias in academia can have a real impact on women’s careers. Whether it’s obtaining a job or publishing a paper, quick judgments made subconsciously by reviewers can have very tangible consequences. In this webinar, you’ll learn the ins and outs of identifying and avoiding the pitfalls of gender bias. You’ll come away with clear evidence of the influence of unconscious bias in peer review, and hear about some of the recent efforts by publishers to reduce it, making the publishing process fairer and more equitable for all.

Ask the experts

Presenter bios

Joanne Kamens is the Executive Director of Addgene, a mission-driven nonprofit dedicated to helping scientists around the world share useful research reagents and data. She holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard Medical School and founded the Boston chapter of the Association for Women in Science. In 2010, she received the “Catalyst Award from the Science Club for Girls” for her longstanding dedication to empowering women in the STEM fields.

Nicole Neuman holds a PhD in biochemistry from Tufts University, which was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, studying cell signaling. She joined Cell Press in 2012 as Editor of Trends in Biochemical Sciences. Nicole has enjoyed engaging Cell Press in community conversations around gender in the STEM fields, first by organizing a symposium around gender and science and now by co-leading the “The Female Scientist,” a column in the Cell Press blog Crosstalk.

Kate Hibbert holds a degree in Earth Sciences from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Isotope Geochemistry from the University of Bristol. She joined Elsevier in 2015 as a Publisher for its Geochemistry and Planetary Science Journals and has been a true champion for women in STEM.

The new website has a clean new design, makes it easy to find all the ways in which Mendeley can help you as an academic, and helps bring our homepage into line with the fresh designs once you log into your Mendeley account.

“We wanted to update the site and improve the overall visual language, layout and navigation to make it more consistent with our other apps as well as easier for users to navigate and use,” said Matt Coulson, Head of Product. “We also wanted to use it as an opportunity to bring the information on all our products, including recently released features, bang up to date.”

How we designed our website for you, our users

User-centered design is a major part of our design process here at Mendeley, and the website was no different.

Miklos Petravich, Senior UX Designer and lead design on the homepage project, met regularly with users to ensure the website met their needs.

“We got feedback on our initial designs for our homepage where we found out while most people like the clean minimalistic direction but in the early mockups we featured inspirational messages,” said Petravich.
“Through User Discovery, we learned our users are straight-talking, straight to the point,” he said. “We originally thought inspirational messages would be interesting but we listened and learned that this is not what our users want, they want information like a list of features.”

Inspirational messages test design

The new website also allows us to show all the exciting new tools and products we’ve been developing to help researchers.

“We were trying to find a balance between what Mendeley is still known best for — reference manager — and how researchers can discover the tools that Mendeley now has for collaboration and showcasing the impact of their own research,” Petravich said.

What’s Next?

Not everything we changed is about design, however. “We wanted to make it easier for our in-house teams to manage the website,” said Coulson. Behind our shiny new facade is an updated content management system. “This makes it very straightforward to make additions or amendments to the new site without writing a line of code,” he said.

Our plans for the new website are to bring you fresher content and quick updates —information that should not only help new users discover Mendeley, but also help current users find information easier. In the future, we’re going to have a review of all the content on our site and update the information, and we’re going to continue to incorporate more of your feedback.

If you live and work, or even if you are visiting the London area, we’d love to have you in for a User Discovery session. The one-hour sessions are held at our offices in Finsbury Square, and we’ll not only give you a tour of our cool space, but also send you away with a bag of Mendeley goodies and a £50 Amazon* gift card.

And, let us know what you think about the new design in the comments section below!

*If you do not want an Amazon gift card, we will work with you to find a suitable, non-cash alternative.

Mendeley hosts a Hack Day aimed at making Mendeley Datasets accessible by FAIR

Earlier this year we launched Mendeley Data, an open data repository where researchers from all disciplines can deposit their datasets. Because we want to support all fields of science, we allow all file formats, and are flexible in the kinds of metadata researchers have to provide. However, we still want to ensure that it is easy for others to find the data, access the data, and work with the data.

That’s where FAIR comes in. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable and is an approach for data developed since January 2014 by a wide range of scientific and research data organisations including the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL), and which Elsevier and Mendeley and others support strongly.

In the FAIR Data approach, data should be:

Easy to find by both humans and computer systems, with metadata that allow the discovery of interesting datasets;

Stored for long term such that they can be easily accessed and/or downloaded with well-defined license and access conditions, whether at the level of metadata, or at the level of the actual data content;

Ready to be combined with other datasets by humans as well as computer systems;

Ready to be used for future research and to be processed further using computational methods.

Community organizations and funding agencies are starting to recognize the importance of data being FAIR; for example the European Commission is providing researchers that receive funding through Horizon2020 with FAIR data management guidelines.

Mendeley Data wants to support researchers making their data available in a FAIR manner and so we’re delighted to be able to collaborate with the DTL, who are developing FAIR tools.

Hacking the data

Last Friday developers from DTL joined the Mendeley Data developers for a Mendeley hack day. The goal for the hack day was to extend Mendeley Data API, to be able to expose the FAIR metadata, which allows researchers to discover datasets in Mendeley Data based on detailed metadata attributes.

The end goal is that a researcher using a FAIR-enabled tool can carry out a detailed search operation (for example search for datasets about a particular disease condition) and find relevant results from a range of repositories, including Mendeley Data.

In order to enable this, ultimately, we need to create an endpoint which exposes detailed metadata for our datasets. We knew this would be a tall order for our hack day, so we created a proof-of-concept endpoint which exposed this metadata for some static/hardcoded instances of collections and datasets.

This was enough to show the FAIR Data Point in action, starting off accessing Mendeley Data, and then drilling down into these example catalogues and from there finding the example datasets.

Implemented the proof-of-concept FAIR Data Point-compatible endpoint providing metadata which can be consumed by FAIR-enabled tools;

Demoed the Mendeley Data FAIR Data Point in action, navigating through the layers of FAIR metadata including the data repository (Mendeley Data), catalogue, datasets and data files.

The outcomes of the hack day were: a much better understanding of how to make our datasets available as FAIR resources, so they can be found, integrated and reused by researchers along with other FAIR datasets; and creation of an endpoint which is only a few steps away from being productionised and available to use by the community.

We really enjoyed working closely with Luiz, DTL’s CTO, and developers Rajaram and Kees to concretely and tangibly make progress towards making Mendeley Data datasets more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable!

We’re happy and proud to sponsor and contribute to Ada Lovelace Day, held annually on 11 October. Mendeley is sponsoring the Ada Lovelace Day Live!, an annual celebration of the achievements of women in STEM. Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, and a perfect figurehead to represent women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics field.

The event features an inspiring line up of seven women from across the UK STEM world — design engineer Yewande Akinola, planetary physicist Dr Sheila Kanani, science writer Dr Kat Arney, developer Jenny Duckett, mathematician Dr Sara Santos, computational biologist Dr Bissan Al-Lazikani, and climate scientist Dr Anna Jones — each of whom will be giving a ten minute talk about their work. The evening is being compèred by the fabulous Helen Keen.

Mendeley is offering two pairs of tickets to attend this incredible event*, held this year at the IET, Savoy Place, in London at 6:30p.m. on Tuesday 11 October. This contest is now closed. Two names will be drawn at random. Want to make sure you secure your place or need more tickets? Tickets are £20 general entry and £5 concessions, and are available from Eventbrite.

We will also be participating in the worldwide celebrations by interviewing and highlighting women in STEM careers here at Mendeley! Follow our Twitter and Facebook this week and next for new contests, interesting facts and links, and brief interviews. Get a headstart with our Women in STEM series on YouTube:

*Prize is for event entry only. Contest winners are responsible for their own transportation and stay in London.

Finding the right job is important to build your expertise, further your research and get the exposure you need to develop your career. And job listings are not always about finding your next position, but keeping up-to-date in your field, or across disciplines.

Mendeley is launching a new Careers service, which will select thousands of relevant science and technology job postings from the leading job boards, academic institutions, company employers, and recruitment agencies across the world.

You will be able to search and apply for your next position on Mendeley. Sign up for email alerts tailored to your search criteria, and upload your resume to let recruiters and jobs come to you.

Mendeley Careers will also offer guides and resources to help you with your job search and to develop your career further.

Watch for Mendeley Careers launching in October.

We are interested to learn from you about your interest in seeking job and funding opportunities via the Mendeley network. So whether you’re actively seeking or just keeping your options open, check out these opportunities, and let us know what you think in the comments below!